Chancellor Angela Merkel faces an increasingly splintered political landscape after voters punished her party and lifted the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany to its best showing yet in three state elections dominated by the refugee crisis.

Support for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union tumbled across the board Sunday as her candidates failed to capture two western states including Baden-Wuerttemberg, home to carmaker Daimler. Her party hung on to win the most votes in Saxony-Anhalt in the formerly communist east, though Alternative for Germany, or AfD, upended the coalition math there by winning 24.2 per cent support in its first attempt in the state.

While Merkel didn’t make the rounds of evening talk shows, CDU party officials signaled she won’t renounce her stance of fighting for open travel and commerce within the European Union and a deal with Turkey to stanch the flow of refugees from war-torn Syria. Merkel will chair a meeting of her party’s national leadership on Monday to assess the election results and plans to hold a news conference at 1:15 p.m. in Berlin.

The election outcome will add to the unease within Merkel’s party about her migration policies “but even this protest vote is unlikely to put her job as chancellor at risk,” said Holger Schmieding, Berlin-based chief economist at Berenberg Bank. “Whereas the debate about migration in Germany could get more noisy near-term, by far the most likely scenario remains that Merkel stays in office until the next federal election in September 2017 — and probably beyond.”

The triple contest, dubbed Super Sunday by some German media, was the biggest of Merkel’s third term and the broadest electoral test before the next federal ballot in 18 months’ time. Though voters cast their ballots for regional legislatures, surveys showed the biggest concern to be Europe’s refugee crisis and its impact on Germany after about 1 million asylum seekers, the most since World War II, arrived last year.

That fuelled the expansion of the AfD, which won 15.1 per cent in Baden-Wuerttemberg and 12.6 per cent in Rhineland-Palatinate, the third state voting Sunday, according to preliminary official results.

Jens Schlueter / Getty ImagesAndre Poggenburg, lead candidate of the Alternative fuer Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) political party in state parliamentary elections in Saxony-Anhalt, reacts to election results.

“None of the established parties with seats in the Bundestag had a particularly good night,” Michael Grosse-Broemer, parliamentary whip for Merkel’s party bloc in the federal parliament, said on ARD television, dismissing the AfD as a “protest party.” Peter Tauber, the CDU’s secretary general, said “I don’t see” the need for Merkel to change course.

The CDU fell to its worst result of the postwar era in Baden-Wuerttemberg, compounding the party’s shock at its loss to the Greens in 2011 after more than half a century governing the state. The chancellor’s problem is that polls suggested her party had a lock on all three states as recently as last fall, before the impact of the refugee crisis on Germany upended the contest.

Hans Michelbach, a deputy parliamentary leader of Merkel’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, said the outcome showed a shifting party landscape “with unpredictable consequences” and the only logical conclusion was “a clear change of course in refugee policy.”

Jens Schlueter / Getty ImagesSaxony-Anhalt Governor Reiner Haseloff and lead candidate of the German Christian Democrats (CDU) in state parliamentary elections in Saxony-Anhalt, reacts to results during the state elections.

While “particularly disappointing” for the CDU, the results allow Merkel to blame regional party leaders who criticized her migration policy and lost, while affording her some ammunition against her internal critics, said Carsten Nickel, Brussels-based analyst at researcher Teneo Intelligence.

“Certainly it’s going to put her under increasing pressure,” Nickel said by phone. At the same time, “she’s not going to step down,” he said. “It does look counterintuitive after these results, but there’s simply no alternative to her within her party.”

The Euro edged down 0.2 per cent to $1.1138 as of 8:52 a.m. in Auckland on Monday after the German results came in. It climbed 1.4 per cent last week.

John MacDougall / Associated PressFrauke Petry (L) and Albrecht Glaser of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) party react after state elections exit poll results were announced.

The refugee issue is reverberating around the European Union, replacing the euro-area’s debt woes as the most significant in a series of crises chipping away at the EU’s political and economic cohesion. Bitter disagreements between capitals are stoking fears that border-free travel and commerce — one of the EU’s signature achievements along with the single currency — will be suspended. An associated rise in populism is eroding support for established parties across the bloc, making coalition-building increasingly difficult from Spain to Ireland.

The AfD, which has now won seats in eight of the country’s 16 regional assemblies, shows that Germany is no longer immune to the allure of right-wing populism.

“We have fundamental problems in Germany that led to this outcome,” Frauke Petry, the party’s co-leader, told ARD television in an interview. “Now we want to force the other parties into a substantive debate.”

Felix Kästle / Getty ImagesRiot police block a protest march against the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Stuttgart, southern Germany.

Merkel closed her campaign in Baden-Wuerttemberg on Saturday with a defense of her refugee policy, saying she was pleased that the refugee influx to Germany is decreasing. With EU leaders due in Brussels on Thursday for their second meeting in two weeks on an aid accord with Turkey, she said the $6.7 billion requested by the government in Ankara is worth the price to help dissuade refugees from making the dangerous crossing over the Aegean to Greece.

Sunday’s elections “will not predict the results of the 2017 federal elections, but they signal the extent to which establishment parties are struggling to maintain unity under the strain of the refugee crisis,” Emily Hruban of the Washington-based Bertelsmann Foundation, said in a research note before the voting. “Until other EU states take on responsibility and show solidarity on the issue, Merkel will continue to face a fragmented and volatile political landscape at home.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel exhorted European nations to unite in overcoming the region’s challenges after a year of crises.

“2015 was an unbelievable year, difficult to imagine,” Merkel told her Christian Democratic party members at the start of a two-day conference in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Merkel reaffirmed her position that the region must work together to overcome its worst refugee crisis since World War II and called on party members to support a resolution that calls for reducing the influx into Germany while rejecting a cap on migrants.

“It belongs to the identity of our country to do the most that we can,” Merkel said Monday.

Before her speech Monday urging the rejection of a refugee cap, Merkel armed herself with a vote of confidence by senior members of her Christian Democratic Union, lessening the chances of an open revolt.

Heading into her party’s annual convention, Merkel set the tone for the keynote speech by saying Germany’s economy is strong enough to handle more than 1 million people claiming asylum this year. With the 28-nation European Union divided in its response to the refugee crisis, Germany also has “a duty to work for European unity” and preserve the advantages of open internal borders, she said in an ARD television interview.

The CDU’s executive board declined at a pre-convention meeting Sunday to put an upper limit on the number of refugees Germany will admit, Merkel said. Only international action, such as stronger enforcement of the EU’s outer borders, will reduce the influx, she said.

Thomas Lohnes/Getty ImagesGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel stands at the stage while the CDU party delegates applaud after her speech at the annual CDU federal congress on December 14, 2015 in Karlsruhe, Germany.

“The message is: we want to reduce,” Merkel said in the interview from Karlsruhe. “We want to noticeably reduce the number of people who come to us, but not through unilateral national measures alone, but by looking at why refugees have to leave their homes in the first place.”

As CDU delegates converge on the southwestern city for the two-day party conference, the European refugee crisis that risks overwhelming towns and communities across Germany is the biggest topic on the agenda.

Merkel, while lauded internationally for her open-door policy, has yet to convince party critics that Germany can accommodate and integrate the refugees, many of whom are fleeing civil war in Syria. She faces calls to shift her stance from her party’s youth organization, a caucus representing Germany’s small and midsize companies and a lobby for local governments.

After a decade in power, Merkel said the refugee crisis is the “most complex” political challenge she’s faced. While public resistance to this year’s record number of arrivals has eroded poll ratings for Merkel and her party since the summer, support has stabilized in recent weeks and 76 percent of respondents in a ZDF television poll last week said 2015 was a “good year” for them.

AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis/FileSyrian Kurdish refugee children stand outside their tent at a refugee camp in Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border.

“Of course we have to take people’s concerns seriously,” Merkel said in a ZDF television interview late Sunday. The CDU is united in wanting to curb the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany, but “precisely on the basis of the concept I’ve been advocating for months,” she said.

Merkel touted European successes in curbing the numbers to date, and cited the reduction to near zero of migrants arriving in Germany from the Western Balkans. In the first half of the year, that group represented some 50 percent of all arrivals, she said.

“We are the largest economy in Europe, we fortunately have achieved good economic conditions to master such challenges,” she said. “And therefore we also have the duty to work for the unity of Europe.”